


A Thousand Luscious Splinters

by cashewdani



Series: The Archipelago of Kisses [1]
Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-30
Updated: 2008-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-15 02:49:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1288429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cashewdani/pseuds/cashewdani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She tries to remind herself that he’s just Dan Humphrey, her best friend’s ex-boyfriend from Brooklyn for God’s sake, and that she needs to stop being so spastic.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thousand Luscious Splinters

Chuck shows up two days later with a hickey and a smirk. 

Blair tries to act surprised.

\---

She doesn’t want to ask questions that will only be answered with him declaring his identity, so she says nothing.

She packs her bags instead and mentally lists all his former indiscretions. Blair guesses fucking someone else has to be better than date rape. Better than hideously patterned wool sweaters and threesomes with girls he doesn’t bother to learn the names of.

None of that’s really saying much of anything.

She puts on her highest heels and tightest dress and slaps his face on her way out the door.

\---

The first thing Blair does following going through customs at de Gaulle is order three crepes dripping in chocolate and whipped cream. After the second one she already feels a little sick, but, she makes herself eat all of them. She will finish these crepes and she will not cry over Chuck Bass.

In the end, everything sits heavy in her stomach and she really wants to purge. 

Blair thinks of her mother’s raised eyebrows over the mention of the trip to Tuscany and how her father isn’t expecting her for another four days. She feels shaky and nauseous and both Serena and Nate’s phones go directly to voicemail. For a moment, she’s trapped in last year with Serena absent, Nate acting distant and Chuck being completely deplorable. It makes all of her guts turn over.

Blair scans her address book and finds herself hitting call just because she can see a bathroom out of the corner of her eye.

When he answers, she says, “Humphrey, remind me that Brooklyn is shittier than I feel right now.”

Dan tells her about buying some poetry at a used bookstore and never makes her explain why she’s calling him in the first place.

\---

France is rainy and Blair spends a lot of her time hitting refresh on _Gossip Girl_ and watching dubbed versions of American shows she doesn’t even like stateside. She thinks about whether Serena and Nate are having sex on the beaches of Sag Harbor. What the girl looks like who left the purplish bruise on Chuck’s neck.

He doesn’t go into details in the text messages he’s started sending her. They’re mostly about how he’s lonely and sorry and they contain a lot of expletives about his father.

Blair finds herself composing short, little e-mails to Dan every time Chuck sends her one. She tells him that she thinks he’d like French cigarettes and people watching at corner cafés. How she’s so bored that she’d even consider letting him bring Vanessa over if it means she could have human interaction with someone her own age.

Eventually, he sends her a response that simply says, “Why don’t you come home, Waldorf?” and she books a flight to LaGuardia within the hour.

\---

Her first night back in town, Dan shows up with a box of pizza and _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_. “Serena told me it was one of your favorites,” he says, and it makes her feel a little funny that he bothered to remember that.

Sitting in her bedroom with him is extremely weird. Much weirder than her living room, or the front alcove are, and she wishes her mother wasn’t entertaining in the screening room. 

Blair makes them martinis and finds herself talking way too much about Audrey Hepburn. She tries to remind herself that he’s just Dan Humphrey, her best friend’s ex-boyfriend from Brooklyn for God’s sake, and that she needs to stop being so spastic.

The movie plays and Blair drinks her martini, and then Dan’s, because he hasn’t touched it. She sighs when Holly begins to sing _Moon River_ , the longing and the loneliness resonating, and can feel Dan’s pinky gently move on top of her own. When Blair looks over at him, his eyes are fixed on the screen, and she doesn’t say anything.

Later in the night, over the mostly neglected cheese pie, Blair finally spills about Chuck’s indiscretion and only almost cries. She blames the gin and Mancini’s score and lets Dan call Bass an oblivious asshole until she feels a little better.

In the glow of the television, Blair realizes she might kind of want to kiss Dan Humphrey. It’s less scary than she expected a thought like that would be.

\---

And just like that Blair’s social agenda includes trips to the Prospect Park Zoo and seeing bands in Williamsburg and she doesn’t really know what to make of any of it.

Dan offers half-heartedly to go to _Butter_ a few times if she wants. _Bendel’s_ even comes up on the table after he promises nothing will happen to her on the subway and a possibly homeless man gropes her ass, but, she’s not really all that interested.

Her favorite spots are crawling with tourists and she knows he’d only be going for her anyway. He asks her how that’s any different than what she’s doing with him, but it is, because she’s maybe somehow actually enjoying herself.

Blair starts spending warm, summer evenings in the loft, watching Wes Anderson movies and having arguments over the differences between vintage and secondhand. She lets him download music to her Ipod and spends the long cab rides out to his place trying to come up with a critique he’ll find articulate. 

One day, while they’re in _The Gap_ so he can get a new messenger bag, she gets convinced into buying cotton t-shirts and flip flops that she has to keep at Dan’s so Dorota doesn’t start asking questions. She looks at her purchases later, the clothes so many other girls in America are walking out of malls with, and feels comfortably anonymous.

They get sunburned at Coney Island and blisters along the Brooklyn Bridge and it’s still maybe one of the best Julys she’s ever had.

She wonders if she’s becoming someone else, a girl who visits hipster boutiques that reek of incense and who prefers _Spumoni Gardens_ over five star restaurants. How she doesn’t even care if she is because she hasn’t felt a prick of panic in almost a month.

Blair takes cold showers and avoids Serena’s phone calls. She lies on Dan’s bed while he reads Camus and thinks about kissing him. He looks at her sometimes, like he knows exactly what’s on her mind, and it makes her blush. Hot and pink and obvious.

\---

By August, the city is sweltering and Blair finds herself growing increasingly more antsy and irritable. She can’t sleep at night, and picks fights with Dan. She brings up how Chuck leaves her voicemails of himself jerking off. That her mother’s thinking of cutting Jenny’s internship short and why Vanessa pisses her off more than anyone on the planet. 

When she’s feeling particularly heinous, she mentions Serena, and watching his face fall, wonders why she likes making other people hurt so much.

The problem is Dan doesn’t get angry with her. During her bouts of unsettled induced aggression, he just looks disappointed. She can read in his eyes a request to return to the peaceful normalcy they’ve created; afternoons spent listening to _Arcade Fire_ and eating popsicles and forgetting that she’s sometimes the biggest bitch on the Upper East Side. But, she’s Blair Waldorf and she doesn’t really know what to do when things in her life manage to be quiet.

She settles for Dan telling her to shut-up. For never making her say why she’s really mad: the fact that everywhere she goes Serena’s always been there first.

\---

Serena does eventually sleep with Nate again, and informs Blair with a long e-mail that’s half apology and half bliss.

Blair doesn’t want to tell Dan, but she doesn’t know how not to.

He doesn’t call her for three days afterwards, as though this is all somehow her fault and not his.

\---

By Wednesday though, everything apparently has been smoothed over. He asks, “Would the Planetarium be okay?” and it’s just really nice to hear his voice. 

Dan’s quiet and fidgety when he picks her up in a cab and Blair isn’t used to being the calm one. He stops the driver over four blocks away from the museum and says he has to walk or he’s going to crawl out of his skin. 

She lets him stay a few steps ahead of her and doesn’t get offended. When they reach 81st, he falls back into stride, mutters an apology that lets her know he’s still uncomfortable, but embarrassed with his behavior. It’s such a Dan thing to do that she forgives him, even though she’s sweaty and her shoes hurt.

When the lights come down, she can feel his hand rest on her thigh, the thumb lightly stroking the side of her knee. As they explore the Milky Way, he leans over and kisses her, fingers tangling in her hair.

Dan tastes nothing like Chuck and nothing like Nate, and she knows Serena already knew all about that. Blair makes herself refocus instead on how she always gets what she wants. 

He runs his tongue along the roof of her mouth, and she softly moans under the nighttime sky.

\---

The next morning there are pictures of them holding hands on Central Park West and his body pressing her into the wall of her building all over _Gossip Girl_.

He seems determined while she is giddily relieved and she can’t bear to look at any of them.

\---

Blair will never know if the shift in him is about her or Serena because she can’t bear to make herself ask.

She does know that when Dan kisses her, it leaves her groggy and sated. She loves the feeling of his hands at the waistband of her skirts and his fingertips on the smooth skin of her stomach. He whispers poetry into her ear as he moves inside her and makes her feel delicate and beautiful and like someone else entirely.

She thinks occasionally of the time Chuck bit the inside of her palm, almost hard enough to break the skin, as she had tried to stop him from crying out. She can’t imagine anything like that happening with Dan.

Blair wonders what he thinks about; the things she’ll never be able to recreate.

He keeps his eyes closed, and after a while, so does she.

\---

Labor Day Weekend, she puts her mass produced attire into bags for Goodwill, deletes playlists from Itunes, and tells Dan they need to talk.

She’s tired of being insubstantial.

He hugs her, after she’s said her piece, and he smells like generic aftershave. Blair doesn’t even try to stop herself from crying. Buried in the crook of his neck, his hands warm and solid on her back, she says goodbye to Brooklyn and simplicity and summer and already wants things to be different.

\---

At school their first day back, as Nate and Serena exit a car together, she can feel his eyes on her, but refuses to turn her head. She adjusts her blazer and laughs a little too loudly at something Isabel says and the moment passes.

When she finally looks over, he’s gone, and it’s the same old mellow melancholy.

\---

Chuck pulls her hair during lunch, as though they’re still in second grade. She calls him a perfect example of why abortions should be kept legal, and he attempts a scowl.

But she notices it anyway, the light flush in the apples of his cheeks, warm and red and perfect. Blair knows that reaction, has experienced the same swirl of guilt and embarrassment and lust. The floor gives out underneath her, an anxious gnawing in the pit of her stomach, and it’s sick how right it feels.

She lets him fuck her in the boy’s room on the third floor, like she’s learned nothing since last year. He grabs at her hips and she drags her fingers along his back, trying to claim him, as though there’s any point.

Blair notices the graffiti on the walls, a freckle on Chuck’s left shoulder, the cold edge of the sink on the back of her thighs. With a jerk, she starts to come undone and wants to know what Dan would say and if he misses her.


End file.
